GamePolitics - Comments for "Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence Exaggerated "http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated
Comments for "Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence Exaggerated "enRe: Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence ...http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated#comment-285734
<p>Maxis has been a subsidiary of EA for 15 years now. Let&#39;s stop trying to separate the two. Maxis employees are EA employees. Maxis is EA.</p>
Fri, 15 Mar 2013 01:57:46 +0000Craig R.comment 285734 at http://gamepolitics.comRe: Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence ...http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated#comment-285724
<p>Towns is a little bit like Dwarf Fortress meets Minecraft, I guess - you&#39;ve got a map with different terrain types and wild animals, some of them hostile, and at every even negative floor, there&#39;s monsters, which grow stronger the deeper you get. You &#39;control&#39; a bunch of villagers (in that you can say things like &quot;build wooden walls here&quot;, &quot;make 5 sets of wooden armor&quot; or &quot;I want you to always have 20 Breads in stock&quot;, and adjust their priorities, with categories like &quot;build items&quot;, &quot;build walls&quot;, &quot;harvest and gather&quot;, &quot;cook and bake&quot;, and the all-important &quot;put stuff in their proper containers so they don&#39;t lie all over the floor&quot;) - they need sleep and food, and if they&#39;re happy and you have enough personal rooms available, you&#39;ll randomly get new immigrants. There&#39;s also heroes, which show up once you get a tavern - you have 0 control over them (except they respect locked doors as long as you don&#39;t trap them), they&#39;re replaced if they die or leave, and how many you can have is based on the root of your amount of villagers. Random events include merchants dropping by (each type sells and buys different things, and they sometimes have things you can&#39;t craft on your own), and sieges (monsters showing up at the edge of the map, who wander around a bit, then charge towards your town - there&#39;s some randomness in how strong the sieges are, but the more villagers you have and the deeper you dig, the stronger they can be). Development is still ongoing - they recently added fluid-blocking walls and doors, as well as fluid elevators, but water and lava still don&#39;t seem to hurt anyone, only destroy anything that isn&#39;t fluid-blocking (unless you count trapping villagers who&#39;ll then eventually starve to death). The only way you can directly steer villagers is to convert them to soldiers (they can be converted back at any time), set them in patrol mode, and manually specify where to patrol - particularly helpful to deal with sieges. The pathfinding is still a bit iffy sometimes, though.</p>
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:16:45 +0000Constercomment 285724 at http://gamepolitics.comRe: Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence ...http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated#comment-285707
<p>Towns? I haven&#39;t heard of it.<br />
<br />
I bought SimCity&nbsp;4 a few days ago on half.com for three dollars and some change (and was met with a shipping charge of a similar price) and I am really enjoying it All the fancy-smancy redon crap and no always on DRM. From the moment I installed I was able to play without problem. And to think this game is ten years old. :p&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;- W</p>
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:08:13 +0000Cecil475comment 285707 at http://gamepolitics.comRe: Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence ...http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated#comment-285703
<p>Anyone who has played it should know this without some other source&#39;s observation, we&#39;ve all seen the sever is down message while it tries to reconnect, if their servers were doing what they claimed almost everything would stop working at the very least.. I got it for $40 but I kinda sorta regret it with all the problems, from the server DRM BS to the non-existant AI leading to every agent/sim/whatever horrible traffic problems that&#39;s nearly game breaking unless you make a city with a ridiculously bogus design and other issues/bugs.</p>
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:01:03 +0000PHOENIXZEROcomment 285703 at http://gamepolitics.comRe: Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence ...http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated#comment-285698
<p>It just gets better and better, huh?</p>
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:12:56 +0000Papa Midnightcomment 285698 at http://gamepolitics.comRe: Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence ...http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated#comment-285697
<p>A Maxis employee already admitted on Twitter that it was their own idea, not EA idea.</p>
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:55:57 +0000Speedercomment 285697 at http://gamepolitics.comRe: Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence ...http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated#comment-285666
<p>I&#39;ve been playing SimCity 4 since this whole thing brought it back to my attention (bought it in a Steam Sale a while back), but after 2 silent crashes to desktop, I decided to play Towns instead.</p>
<p><strong>Edit:</strong> Man, people must really hate Towns, huh? That&#39;s two downvotes already.</p>
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:07:17 +0000Constercomment 285666 at http://gamepolitics.comRe: Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence ...http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated#comment-285693
<p>After I was booted out of my SINGLE PLAYER Diablo 3 session due to my internet acting up, I&#39;ve been avoiding Always Online games like an infectious plague.</p>
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:31:38 +0000hellfire7885comment 285693 at http://gamepolitics.comRe: Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence ...http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated#comment-285692
<p>I wouldn&#39;t fault Maxis for this, as they develop the game and Maxis at least used to do nothing more than a CD key for authentication.</p>
<p>I lay the blame for this squarely on EA.</p>
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:30:35 +0000hellfire7885comment 285692 at http://gamepolitics.comRe: Anonymous Maxis Insider Says SimCity Server Dependence ...http://gamepolitics.com/2013/03/13/anonymous-maxis-insider-says-simcity-server-dependence-exaggerated#comment-285669
<p>I could see them doing the major calculations serverside if the actual city borders weren&#39;t so tiny. If the game was just the entire 16 city region area as one open &quot;city&quot; and it allowed multiple people to build on it at the same time, requiring serverside calculations to offload the client would actually make sense. It&#39;s like they made two major compromises to solve the same issue, when they could have just made one.</p>
Wed, 13 Mar 2013 22:38:36 +0000MrKloroxcomment 285669 at http://gamepolitics.com